You are not answering the question that was asked. ianl's post was directly in reference to web application development, not systems programming. Of course you wouldn't do that with PHP. That's like saying "yeah, it's a great knife, but it can't change my oil." Well...sure. Nobody's saying it can. But it does what we're actually talking about just fine, and I am skeptical of ianl's claims that there are missing pieces of the infrastructure for web development.

(BTW: Puppet not playing nicely with PHP is new to me as I use it regularly. And I don't think you get much with Mongrel that nginx/FPM don't do well enough.)

Yep. And if you use something like Thrift ( http://wiki.apache.org/thrift/ ) building a SOA that includes PHP service components is fairly simple.